Mark Thompsons Blog

John and I had a rare day out the office together yesterday to go up to Microsoft HQ in Reading.

Some years ago John purchased the SBS Migration toolkit from Jeff Middleton and that has helped us any number of times when completing swing migrations. Typically this has been moving clients from Small Business Server 2003 to SBS 2008 or 2011. The published Microsoft method for completing a migration is plain dangerous where in contrast Jeffs careful methodology is both more logical and more or less risk free.

I knew that Jeff organised conferences in New Orleans every couple of years but so far I haven’t been able to justify the trip out there. However when I got the email to say that SBSMigration.com were organising a world tour with Jeff and a number of other speakers I knew that was a must-attend event.

Yesterday didn’t disappoint. The (long) day started off with an opening address from David Overton. If you have been around the SBS scene for a few years you will probalby remember that David headed up the UK Microsoft small business team. He was (and still is) one of the best things to come out of Microsoft and is always entertaining, informative and tells it like it is. Yesterday he gave us a good overview on Windows Intune and made it clear that this should be on every Consultants list of products to sell.

The day went on with presentations on business analysis for SME consultants, a long sessions on Windows Muti-Point server, an overview of the HP Proliant microservers and ML110  and then in the afternoon sessions on all the various Microsoft SBS products.

We finished off with Jeff giving an excellent talk on his migration toolkits and a general overview of his world view of the Cloud, SBS and where consultants like us should be heading.

John and I have come back far better informed about a number of products we had previously not paid much attention to. We can now examine our existing client base and see where some of this new thinking can fit.

Also I came back feeling completely vindicated in our decision to fully embrace cloud technologies. Internally we are now migrated to Office 365 and Trend Micro Safe Sync; we have no servers left in-house at all. Once I find a way to run Sage in the cloud with decent performance we will be fully decentralised. So far the only internal service left is a single NAS device used to spool images from the IP CCTV system. If we have good enough internet here even that could be sent directly to storage in the cloud but so far that is some way off.

Many thanks to Jeff and everyone at Microsoft, SBSMigration.com and the Thames Valley SBS group for organising an excellent day.

http://mvptour2011.sbsmigration.com/

Massive congratulations to all the team at Routeone for winning the prestigeous Drapers Independent Etailer of the Year award.
on the 28th January.

We’re exceptionally proud to be part of the team at Routeone (and also TKC Sales) and to have worked hard over the last year or so to implement new systems throughout the business. This process is ongoing with another major upgrade to go ahead in the next few months.

Well done to Neil and all the team!

Affinity Partner

We recently migrated one of our larger clients to Trend Micro’s Worry Free Business Advanced security software. This replaced another providers hosted content filtering service.

Not only does this service save them over £1200 per annum compared to the previous solution it also enables them to manage their online spam filtering better.

The first astonishing figure that came out of management panel was that they are receiving over 100 million messages per annum to their various domains. They are an online retailer by the way. The second figure is that less than 0.5% of the messages they receive are passed as ‘clean’.

There is a general lesson to be learned here. This client needs to very pro-actively block spam before it enters the network just due to the sheer volumes received. If they did not block it before it hit their network they would bear the cost of processing and then storing all this spam. Even if users immediately delete the spam it still ends up in the Exchange mailserver databases for a period. This needs to be stored on expensive servers and then backed up. Also your internet bandwidth is used up receiving all this utterly useless mail.

Don’t let spam kill your network. Deal with it before it reaches your network.

We are Trend Micro Affinity partners have a central management console for all our Trend clients so we can manage and control both  hosted and on-premise security software from the comfort of our offices. We can immediately tell if servers or workstation have got out of date with signatures and also tell when the licence is about to expire, etc.

For expert computer support in the Bristol and Bath area please contact us today.

Those computer updates are important!

We provide PC, Computer and network support to many clients in the Bristol and Bath area. Whilst we like to see our clients on a regular  basis we would really like to see some computers less frequently.

In the last year the Malware writers have discovered new methods of infecting PCs. It looks like that Windows XP based machines can no longer be made secure; even with the best anti-virus software installed and all the Microsoft updates applied. Using Firefox as opposed to Internet Explorer is also no protection.

Specifically PDF files can now be infected and this is now a very prevalent vector of infecting PCs. Over the years more or less everyone has come to regard the .pdf format as safe and not able to carry executable functions. However this is now seen to be just plain wrong and pdf’s can be manipulated to carry malicious code.

Adobe and others are trying to address this so it is vitally important that when you see that little indicator on the taskbar saying updates are available that you apply those updates. I cannot stress this enough; apply the Adobe updates! The same is true of Microsoft as well. If Windows is telling you there are updates waiting don’t hesistate – install them.

The other main vector of attack is hijacked websites. Many, many entirely innocent websites are now infected by the Malware writers. Just by visting these sites your computer can become infected and there is every chance you will not know at the time. You PC might start to become unresponsive and perhaps you start getting strange search results and these are the classic signs of malware on your PC.

My best advice if you are one of those people who seems to get repeated virus infections is to replace your XP based PC with a new one running Windows 7. Windows 7 does seem to date the most secure Windows operating system and combined with something like Trend Micro Worry Free Business software appears to be able to keep the virus writers at bay.

The other alternative is to go for an Apple Mac. We have migrated a good number of users to Mac over the years and the problems with malware just doesn’t exist in the same way. With the recent release of Office 2011 for Mac, Apple users can now get Outlook again on Mac. We have started to role this out to users and so far it looks good – better than Entourage.

Myself and my eldest daughter went to the Bristol branch British Computer Society Christmas lecture lastnight. The subject was RoboThespian (see here for his creators).

RoboThespian is a humanoid robot and at first glance looks rather like the Terminator. However a closer look reveals a somewhat less intimidating robot. Indeed he is a charming, funny robot and his original role in life was to be a robotic presenter. His creators have sold him (well actually the various models of him – brothers?, sisters?, clones?) around the world to places like the Carnegie Science Center and the Eden Project. RoboThespian presents, emotes, sings, explains,and entertains and at first glance seems like a clever toy.

RoboThespian

The real cleverness of RoboThespian is more subtle that his first appearence. Currently he has little embedded intelligence (but more of that later) but he has generated a lot of interest in other robotic research centres. RoboThespian is an excellent test bed for human-machine interaction. He expresses emotion through his eyes (2″ LCD screens in case you wondered) and the colour changes in his cheeks. His head is cleverly designed to be ‘friendly’ with big ears and smooth curves. He is quite humerous and bursts into song. The children in the audience last night were not the least intimidated by him and it was noticible that people, even the man controlling him, would talk to him directly just as if he were a real person. Push on his robotic limbs and he pushes (gently) back – ‘compliance’ we were told was the name for this. Most impressive is the natural, fast sweep and movement of his limbs just through comperssed air and eletro-mechanical actuators. This is very lifelike and it is easy to envisage strong, agile robots competing with humans for the abilty to handle complex, dexterous tasks in the next few decades.

As mentioned RoboThespian does not carry much embedded intelligence. He carries a main computer and a number of other embedded processors but his programming comes from an external control unit. His movements and interactions are pre-programmed so the current models are really meant to present a pre-set talk or speech. However his creators are now moving into adding more AI into him. Basic speech recognition is implemented as is colour recognition and object following. Fairly soon RoboThespian will be able interact with his audience so for example he will ask you for your name and if you tell him the colour of your jacket, shirt, etc., he will scan the audience to find you.

If you get the chance do go and see him!

A few weeks ago I blogged on having attended the Microsoft conference in London billed Transition to the Cloud.

Steve Bulmers message to us resellers was pretty bleak. In their view resellers who rely on on-site support and service contracts were doomed and we would not be selling any more servers to SMEs. We all had to become Azure platform developers or die. Not very subtle and all a bit gloomy.

We took this message onboard and have spent the intervening weeks discussing this message both internally and with a number of clients (some even read the blog!).

Thinking the Microsoft message over carefully and examing what we do and what our clients do now and what they will probably doing in the future has, to our minds, revealed a less pessimistic future for us.

Firstly although we can quite see that we will not be putting in Microsoft Exchange in-house for the smallest clients, say the 1-10 user range, ALL our clients currently run one or more server-based applications that they would have difficulty in putting in the cloud. Most sites run network versions of Sage for example, and many others have other SQL based database applications for running their businesses. These range from plant nursery software, financial services databases, CAD/CAM parametric design software, etc. Now all these applications can go into the cloud on dedicated servers (and Sage offer hosted Sage for example) but when you consider the cost of hosting your file storage, hosting your Exchange, hosting your various applications, the costs really mount up. In fact for most clients with any kind of need above the most basic email/file/print facility the monthly cost of putting all this in cloud over a period of a few years would well exceed the cost of having it on-premise.

We have started to migrate a couple of clients away from Small Business Server to Office365. Now both these clients have downsized in recent years and their existing servers are due for a hardware refresh. We analysed what they do and they fitted the profile for a cloud based business; no database applications or other ‘unusual’ applications, email requirement and lots of mobility. Interestingly neither client wanted their data hosted in the cloud and both have opted for local NAS devices.

Talking the Microsoft strategy over with a number of clients some were a bit panicked with the idea that we would no longer be providing on-site support, even if they had no servers. Seems that we are wanted after all

Also this morning Microsoft dropped a note through to Partners about the next version of Small business Server, cunningly called Small Business Server 2011. This will come in three flavours now; Essentials, Standard and Premium. The major difference over SBS 2008 is the Essentials version. This comes without Exchange and presumes that you will use Office 365 for email. Interesting that Microsoft still see small businesses using the other two versions of SBS over the next few years.

The other bit of good news is the Microsoft Intune tool. This is a piece of client software that talks back to a portal on the intenet and monitors the client PC for patches, viruses, malware, performance issues, etc. The Intune subscription also includes an upgrade to windows 7 Ultimate. We see this as being an excellent tool for us and our clients as we will be able down to the level of individual workstations no matter where the are.

I’ll add more about our cloud strategy over the next few weeks.

We had a call recently from a client. He had just received an (unsolicited)  phone call from a foreign call centre. The man on the phone told him “they” (he thinks they called themselves something like Microsoft support) had detected that he had a virus on his computer and that they could remove it for him. Our client, being a trusting type of person, let them talk him through going to a website and then running some Windows commands. Sure enough the results that appeared on his screen proved he had a virus. If he would only give them his credit card details they would remotely remove the virus infection.

At this point our client sensibly rang off and called us. He was seriously worried now that he had somehow got a virus on his system but was suspicious enough to call us first. We were able to reassure him that this was a scam. A quick check over via our support tool proved that his computer was fully up to date with security software.

He has no idea how he was selected for this scam and I have not seen anything on the internet to suggest how they get phone numbers. Presumably he has filled in an online form at some point and that information has either leaked or been sold to the scammers.

This is obviously a very worrying incident on a number of levels. Firstly of course many people might be taking in by this scan. In this case the poor English of the caller made it difficult for him to understand what he was being asked so he ended the call early. Secondly it seems a bunch of criminals now have his phone number and maybe other personal details.

Googling this type of incident revealed that this scam is now quite widespread. I also found one article that said that an Australian ISP is actually calling its’ domestic customers when they detect malware/botnet activity from the customers connection. This is of course quite laudable and we have seen similar activity from Zen (www.zen.co.uk) who pro-actively contact our business clients if they detect botnet traffic over a Zen connection. However this legitimate support activity is going to make it much more difficult to detect the scammers among the genuine support calls.

If in doubt contact your trusted support professionals!

Yesterday (05/10/2010) I attended Microsoft’s Transition to the Cloud briefing in the Excel centre in London.

This was billed as a must attend event for Microsoft partners and this was underlined by the fact that we were due to have a video presentation by Steve Ballmer. In the event Steve Ballmer was actually there in person to give the keynote – this really was an important event in Microsoft’s terms. His theme was that the old world has gone – in-house servers, network, support – and the new world is rapidly taking over – smart clients accessing lean apps hosted in the cloud, the Microsoft cloud.

Mr Steve Bullmer, CEO Microsoft (aka Monkeyboy)

None of us that have been paying attention in the last year or so can have failed to notice that our smallest clients have been looking away from having servers in-house to moving to hosted or cloud based services. For businesses such as ours this has consequences – clients not having equipment on the premises means customers not needing engineers like us to look after them.

The event yesterday was billed as the way for Partners to find out how to make money out of the cloud. This is certainly our top priority as a business – how to sell, exploit and make money from putting our clients applications and data in the cloud.

The message from Microsoft yesterday was shockingly explicit – on-premise servers and the support contracts that go with them are dead.

It actually took until near the end of the 7 hour day for this to be spelt out but that was certainly the subtext of the entire day; selling servers to small and medium sized enterprises is history. On-premise Exchange servers and those Exchange administration skills will belong to antique shops.

The other explicit message of the day was that Microsoft want partners  – all partners it seems – to become developers. Not just any developers of course but Microsoft developers using the Azure platform. The vision is that I.T. budgets will not be spent of hardware and software on-premise but rather in developing smart, lean applications based upon a cloud based platform. For example your CRM application will store its’ data in a SQL database hosted in the cloud somewhere.

If Microsofts vision of the future hold true it means a change of direction for us; we have development skills in-house but we have concentrated in recent years on our networking and support skills.

Microsoft did throws us support business one bone yesterday. They previewed the forthcoming Intune product. This looks very interesting for us. It is in essence something like System Center for small businesses. It is a control panel based in the cloud that monitors all your PCs for their health – patching, security software, etc. This subscription based service also includes an upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate and a remote support tool based upon Office Communicator.

Enough for Part 1 of this blog. In my second part I’ll examine the opportunities for Partners like us in this new world.

Newsflash July 2010
We are now Microsoft BPOS partners.

After having successfully passed more Microsoft exams Thompson Consultants Ltd are now Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) partners.

This means that we can now advise on and resell the range of Microsoft Online services. See here for details on the Microsoft website.

What is in this for our clients?

Well, increasingly our smaller clients are looking to use the internet cloud to host all their data and applications and the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite will provide most of the tools and applications they need. BPOS provides hosted Exchange 2007, hosted SharePoint and Microsoft Communicator and Live Meeting.

The hosted Exchange in BPOS provides a generous 25Gb mailbox and you can also share Calendars, Tasks and Contacts with the other users in your group. Microsoft pickup all the tedious but necessary effor involved in managing and backing up Exchange so the users only need to worry about their email.

Similarly with Sharepoint you let Microsoft take the strain of maintaining the system while you get on with uploading content.

The obvious target of these services are small workgroups/businesses/organisations that do not currently have a central server for file and mail services. Rather than investing in on-premise solutions – as would have been the case up until now – clients can save their capital and instead move to a monthly fixed payment model.

Also perhaps larger businesses that have small, distributed groups working on projects might look at this as the ideal short term solution.

As well as the Microsoft suite we will also be provinding hosted online storage for when SharePoint is not the required solution.

With our hosted Asterisk VoIP services, Microsoft BPOS and online storage and backup Thompson Consultants are poised to offer the SME a complete hosted office solution.

We can’t be the only reseller to have been negatively affected the the December changes to the Eopen licensing site.

Microsoft replaced EOpen with Microsoft Volume Licensing Serivce Centre in early December and from the very start the change has been a disaster. Firstly the whole site went down and was unavailable for the best part of two weeks. That meant that if you wanted to add new agreememts, like we did, you simply couldn’t.

Then when the site came backup it had been replaced by VLSC. The idea of this seems to be to lock partners out of the volume licensing process as far as possible. Microsoft even in essence accuse resellers of being untrustworthy and a responsible for piracy of volume licenced products and therefore in need of being removed from the licensing process as far as possible. Now Microsoft want end users to be responsible for volume licence agreements directly and to then grant their reseller permission to access their agreement.

On the face of it, from Microsoft’s perspective, this seems a resonable idea. However in the real world the licensing process (their licensing process!) is too complex for the majority of end users to either want to, or be able to, complete it. The new process involves and end user logging on to a website, creating a Microsoft Live ID (“but I don’t want a Hotmail address”), registering a ‘business’ email address, accepting the licence agreement and then navigating through the deeply confusing web site to find a section where they can then grant their reseller permission, by adding another email address, to administer the licence. Then wait for a few days while you work out the process had failed somewhere.

The end user details we tend to include in the licence registrion process are senior decision makers – directors, owners, manager – just the kind of people who don’t want any involvment in signing up to Microsoft Hotmail accounts, licensing sites and the whole nine yards. Their first reaction to us is that this is exactly the kind of nonsense they pay us to look after. They simply want nothing to do with it. They want to purchase software from us and have us install it.

The other problem with the new site is that the process is simply not working. I spent the best part of 8 hours on the phone and emailing various MS staff over the last 10 days just trying to get 5 Windows 7 licences added to an existing agreement. Eopen just worked. You added the agreement number, authorisation ID and then the keys just appeared in your control panel. Now, we at least, are having to phone the VLSC call centre in India to try and get licences added to the control panel. The staff there seem completely unbothered by the urgency of these requests, clueless as to the new process, unintelligible, and have a stock answer of ‘try again in 24 hours’.

I see this weekend the site is down again. Being re-engineered by any chance Microsoft? Please bring back EOpen or just face up to the fact the end users pay their resellers to provide a service. Let us provide that service and get back to selling licences.

I personally am blogging, complaining and giving grief to any Microsoft employee I can find in order to get this changed.